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Lot Essay
Gifted by Frank Auerbach to the prominent British Pop artist Joe Tilson the year it was painted, Carreras Factory at Mornington Crescent (1961) is a finely-wrought example of his early landscape paintings. Executed on a jewel-like scale in rich, sculptural impasto—streaks of ivory, khaki, blue-grey and deep black are dragged, scored and built into peaks by the artist’s brush, and enlivened by a central flash of red that glows like a beacon—it epitomises the extraordinary painterly idiom with which Auerbach made his name. The work’s subject, distilled to near-abstract blocks of light and shadow, is the Carreras cigarette factory, viewed from across Harrington Square near Mornington Crescent station. Auerbach, who has held the same studio in Camden since 1954, has always studied his North London environment with keen attention, charting its constancy and change across decades of paintings. The Art-Deco Carreras building, completed in 1928, is noted for its Egyptian Revival detailing, including two statues of black cats flanking the entrance. Though later restored, these features were lost upon its conversion to offices in 1961: perhaps it was this change to its façade which caught the artist’s eye that year.
Auerbach and Tilson both studied at London’s Royal College of Art in the 1950s. While their practices are visually very different—Tilson’s colourful, formally radical Pop innovations share little with Auerbach’s brand of uniquely intense figuration—the two both came of age in a decade when the capital was bursting into new life, and were informed by their vibrant surroundings. Auerbach, who had fled Germany aged eight in 1932 and would scarcely ever leave London for his entire adult life, saw architectural order emerging from formless chaos as the city rebuilt itself after the Second World War. This new London made for a thrillingly unprecedented subject, and Auerbach forged a new language with which to convey its drama. Surfaces of thick paint and rectilinear structure made for analogues of broken earth, exposed scaffolding and busy human activity. This forceful figurative approach was informed by his teacher David Bomberg, under whom he studied in night classes at Borough Polytechnic during the late 1940s and early 1950s: Auerbach brought to bear on landscape as much as portraiture Bomberg’s urge to capture ‘the spirit in the mass’.
‘I have a strong sense that London hasn’t been properly painted’, Auerbach later said. ‘... Monet on the Thames, Derain at the docks; bits and pieces, rather spottily, by Whistler and Sickert. But it has always cried out to be painted, and not been’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 84). Channelling the influence of these forebears - particularly Monet, who similarly returned to his subjects through the seasons - Auerbach chronicled the changing light, weather and skyline of his locale over periods of weeks, months and years. From the 1970s onwards, his palette brightened and his paint became looser. It is in early works such as the present, however, that his embeddedness in the city is most viscerally felt. With its clear grey light and earthy, three-dimensional terrain of pigment, the work seems to physically capture a part of London itself, condensing paint into a tangible artefact of place and history.
Auerbach and Tilson both studied at London’s Royal College of Art in the 1950s. While their practices are visually very different—Tilson’s colourful, formally radical Pop innovations share little with Auerbach’s brand of uniquely intense figuration—the two both came of age in a decade when the capital was bursting into new life, and were informed by their vibrant surroundings. Auerbach, who had fled Germany aged eight in 1932 and would scarcely ever leave London for his entire adult life, saw architectural order emerging from formless chaos as the city rebuilt itself after the Second World War. This new London made for a thrillingly unprecedented subject, and Auerbach forged a new language with which to convey its drama. Surfaces of thick paint and rectilinear structure made for analogues of broken earth, exposed scaffolding and busy human activity. This forceful figurative approach was informed by his teacher David Bomberg, under whom he studied in night classes at Borough Polytechnic during the late 1940s and early 1950s: Auerbach brought to bear on landscape as much as portraiture Bomberg’s urge to capture ‘the spirit in the mass’.
‘I have a strong sense that London hasn’t been properly painted’, Auerbach later said. ‘... Monet on the Thames, Derain at the docks; bits and pieces, rather spottily, by Whistler and Sickert. But it has always cried out to be painted, and not been’ (F. Auerbach, quoted in R. Hughes, Frank Auerbach, London, 1990, p. 84). Channelling the influence of these forebears - particularly Monet, who similarly returned to his subjects through the seasons - Auerbach chronicled the changing light, weather and skyline of his locale over periods of weeks, months and years. From the 1970s onwards, his palette brightened and his paint became looser. It is in early works such as the present, however, that his embeddedness in the city is most viscerally felt. With its clear grey light and earthy, three-dimensional terrain of pigment, the work seems to physically capture a part of London itself, condensing paint into a tangible artefact of place and history.